White House Blames Polar Vortex on Global Warming

Senior science adviser John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, released an official 2-minute video Wednesday blaming the polar vortex that brought record-breaking cold to the United States on global warming.

Yup, that’s right, global warming!!

Apparently, the danger of global warming induced record-breaking cold is so great that the White House hastily put together a special citizen-interactive live presentation titled “Polar Vortex and Extreme Weather” for today at 2 p.m. eastern time “for a conversation with leading meteorologists, climate scientists, and weather experts about why temperatures dipped to such frigid lows this week”.

The White House even sent out a special email late yesterday to everyone on its mailing list advising they tune into today’s discussion. The White House doesn’t do stuff like that very often.

Remember, assuming you still have a job, your hard earned tax dollars pay for things like that.

Linking the Polar Vortex to Global Warming

Odds are that we can expect, as a result of global warming, to see more of this pattern of extreme cold in the mid-latitudes (United States) …The kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues – John Holdren, Senior White House Science Adviser, 1/8/2014

Holdren’s reasoning goes like this… The polar zones are warming twice as fast as the tropics because of global warming. As a result, the temperature difference between the Arctic and mid-latitudes is deceasing. A strong temperature gradient between the Arctic and mid-latitudes is needed to keep the polar vortex up over the north pole where it belongs. But, as a result of the weakening temperature gradient, the polar vortex has begun to waiver, wander around and now dips down into the mid-latitudes where we live.

Any undergraduate physics student will tell you Holdren’s is a perfectly good “hand-waving argument”, but it isn’t proof of anything. Just because something sounds logical doesn’t mean it is real. To be real a concept must be turned into verifiable predictions. That has never been done with Holdren’s theory.

Nobody predicted the polar vortex blast we experienced, nor has any polar vortex wanderings based on Holdren’s explanation ever been forecast in advance. Until that happens Holdren’s theory is what it is… words… a Physics 101 “hand-waving argument”.

According to a 1998 description of the polar vortex by the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), polar vortex events like now occur once or twice a year. Always have.

The Political Angle

Naturally, as one might expect, everything the White House does has a political purpose.

These introduce dramatic, fundamental shifts in U.S. energy policy. In essence, the Administration says that energy projects requiring government approval, like the Keystone XL pipeline, must include an evaluation of its CO2 emissions before it can be approved. If it creates to much “carbon pollution” then the project will not be approved.

This shift also sets the stage for hugely expensive EPA regulatory restrictions put onto anything that uses fossil fuels, like coal-fired electric plants, that will increase energy costs for all consumers.

Conclusions

To justify Administration energy policy, especially since it is so expensive, there must be a compelling enemy that Americans can understand and oppose.

No one fears a trace invisible gas whose increase makes plants grow faster; that every human exhales and that is essential to the existence of life on earth.

But people do fear disasters whose causes they don’t understand.

That is why the Administration has gone to the absurd extreme claiming that global warming causes record-breaking cold temperatures.

——————————————————————————————————————————–Update: 1/10/2014 3:47 p.m. PTIn case you missed it (only 225 people watched it live) here is the full 46 minute video made of today’s Google+ Hangout discussion panel organized by “We The Geeks” on this week’s polar vortex event:

If you are a human-caused global warming skeptic you’ll be pleasantly surprised to discover the event wasn’t purist AGW alarmist propaganda.

The real scientists in the panel were quite forthcoming and accurate in their discussion of the polar vortex and its relationship to climate change.

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